nd could not
tell me which way to take; what odds to him who was King, or Pope, so
long as he paid his way, and got a bit of bacon on Sunday? And would I
please to remember that I had roused him up at night, and the quality
always made a point of paying four times over for a man's loss of
his beauty-sleep. I replied that his loss of beauty-sleep was rather
improving to a man of so high complexion; and that I, being none of the
quality, must pay half-quality prices: and so I gave him double fee, as
became a good farmer; and he was glad to be quit of Kickums; as I saw by
the turn of his eye, while going out at the archway.

All this was done by lanthorn light, although the moon was high and
bold; and in the northern heaven, flags and ribbons of a jostling
pattern; such as we often have in autumn, but in July very rarely. Of
these Master Dryden has spoken somewhere, in his courtly manner; but of
him I think so little--because by fashion preferred to Shakespeare--that
I cannot remember the passage; neither is it a credit to him.

Therefore I was guided mainly by the sound of guns and trumpets, in
riding out of the narrow ways, and into the open marshes. And thus I
might have found my road, in spite of all the spread of water, and the
glaze of moonshine; but that, as I followed sound (far from hedge or
causeway), fog (like a chestnut-tree in blossom, touched with moonlight)
met me. Now fog is a thing that I understand, and can do with well
enough, where I know the country; but here I had never been before. It
was nothing to our Exmoor fogs; not to be compared with them; and all
the time one could see the moon; which we cannot do in our fogs; nor
even the sun, for a week together. Yet the gleam of water always makes
the fog more difficult: like a curtain on a mirror; none can tell the
boundaries.

And here we had broad-water patches, in and out, inlaid on land, like
mother-of-pearl in brown Shittim wood. To a wild duck, born and bred
there, it would almost be a puzzle to find her own nest amongst us; what
chance then had I and Kickums, both unused to marsh and mere? Each time
when we thought that we must be right, now at last, by track or passage,
and approaching the conflict, with the sounds of it waxing nearer,
suddenly a break of water would be laid before us, with the moon looking
mildly over it, and the northern lights behind us, dancing down the
lines of fog.

It was an awful thing, I say (and to this day I remember